As I sat in the reception hall, holding my beloved’s hand and watching Fahmi’s father cry as he gave his daughter away, my thoughts turned to my own father. Yesterday was the third birthday my dad did not celebrate. He would have been 67.
red and gold
Red henna covers my right palm and inner wrist in an intricate design.
It was painted on Friday by a woman I’d met that evening, a cousin of Fahmida’s whose name is Fatima.
That evening, four of us accompanied our friend John and his parents to his bride’s family home in Brooklyn. There, we were generously received, fed incredible homemade Indian food, and entertained with traditional Bengali dance. This was but one of the many rituals leading up to John and Fahmida’s wedding in Queens today.
It was certainly the most colorful wedding I’ve ever had the honor to take part in. We (Ethan and I, and our friends Stacy and David, and some other ifMUDders) got to participate quite a bit. We wore traditional clothing. I heard an Islamic sermon for the first time.
There is much more, and it will come – in snippets. I figured, planning to put it all into one long post was a bit delusional. Now you have a framework; the nooks of memory will whisper the rest soon.
French history
Goodness, I’m blogging queen for the day. Enjoy it while it lasts; you and I both know it won’t for long…
I’m confused. Robespierre, the French revolutionary-turned-apparent-dictator who was guillotined when the people had had enough. You know what I’m talking about. Well, S. T. Coleridge, in the third act of his “The Fall of Robespierre,” has Barrere making a speech. Here’s part of that speech:
…When the tyrant
Hurl’d from his blood-cemented throne, by the arm
Of the almighty people, meets the death
He plann’d for thousands. Oh! my sickening heart
Has sunk within me, when the various woes
Of my brave country crowded o’er my brain
In ghastly numbers—when assembled hordes,
Dragg’d from their hovels by despotic power,
Rush’d o’er her frontiers, plunder’d her fair hamlets,
And sack’d her populous towns, and drench’d with blood
The reeking fields of Flanders.—When within,
Upon her vitals prey’d the rankling tooth
Of treason; and oppression, giant form,
Trampling on freedom, left the alternative
Of slavery, or of death. Even from that day,
When, on the guilty Capet, I pronounced
The doom of injured France, has faction reared
Her hated head amongst us. Roland preach’d
Of mercy—the uxorious dotard Roland,
The woman-govern’d Roland durst aspire
To govern France; and Petion talk’d of virtue,
And Vergniaud’s eloquence, like the honeyed tongue
Of some soft Syren wooed us to destruction.
We triumphed over these. On the same scaffold
Where the last Louis pour’d his guilty blood,
Fell Brissot’s head, the womb of darksome treasons,
And Orleans, villain kinsman of the Capet,
And Hébert’s atheist crew, whose maddening hand
Hurl’d down the altars of the living God,
With all the infidel’s intolerance.
I can kind of see the reference… I think. Roland, in the Italian-connected cycle, is bewitched by a Pagan princess from China, and more or less travels the entire known world in search of her, madly in love. He’s blinded by a woman, etc.
But was Robespierre? I can’t find any information on him that would make the uxorious-dotard lines make sense. Nevermind that a French historical character making wholly disparaging reference to Roland is in itself more than a little strange. Help?
EDIT 23.47: Oh! It was Madame Roland. THAT explains it. From the Britannica:
(1754�93). The wife of a French politician during the French Revolution, Madame Roland greatly influenced the policies of the moderate Girondist faction of the revolutionaries. The Girondists professed moderate republican views and opposed the excesses of the more radical party.
Jeanne-Marie Phlipon was born in Paris on March 17, 1754, the daughter of an engraver. An avid reader, she absorbed the democratic ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other 18th-century French philosophers. In 1780 she married Jean-Marie Roland de La Plati�re. He was a government official who afterward became a leader of the Girondist party.
When the French Revolution came, Madame Roland became the intellectual leader of a group of young enthusiasts who gathered in her salon. Her visitors included the famous and ill-fated leaders of the Gironde. At first even Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton, leaders of the opposing Jacobins, belonged to her circle.
So, this isn’t my Roland at all.
From Cucina Pratica
Subtitle of the cookbook, translated: Recipes, ideas, advice for the modern woman. Subtitle notwithstanding, this cookbook (purchased in 1995 in Padova, on clearance for something like $10) is one of my favorites. Practical cuisine, indeed; tasty dishes of varying complexity. The following measures were eyeballed all to hell.
Take five medium-sized zucchini. Wash them, trim the ends and lovingly cut into thin (3-5mm) circles. Set aside. Mince a good handful of fresh parsley, and set that aside too.
Heat up a large frying pan; a wok would work too, but probably not quite as well. In 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil and 1-2 tablespoons of butter (no less than 3 tbsp of fats), fry up 3-5 cloves of sliced – not mashed – garlic, and a round slice of a Mayer lemon cut up in eighths like a tiny pie. Fry that until the garlic and lemon are done, then fish them out of the oil-and-butter and set them aside.
Toss in the zucchini and coat in the sauce. Cover and steam-fry for a minute or two, just to get them sweating. Take off the cover and toss in some salt, freshly ground pepper and a little of the parsley. Toss well and keep stirring occasionally until the zucchini are done to your liking. Don’t worry if they get mushy; keep frying them, and eventually they’ll turn this amazing crusty brown.
While waiting for the veggies to fry, cut another piece off the lemon and squeeze its juice into the cooked garlic and lemon. At the end, toss in that mixture and the rest of the parsley, and fry on high heat just until the parsley is heated through.
Eat as a side dish with your burger, or with anything really. Then, when it’s summer and parsley actually has a scent, cook this again and allow the green trance to overtake your kitchen.
arRSSgh
Every time I change the RSS template, LiveJournal reads them as new messages and thus reposts them to people’s friends lists and flooding.
Sorry about that. I’ll leave the template alone now.
In the name of
“This is clear evidence of God’s existence,” they say.
But if you believe in a god, why do you need evidence that this god exists? And why would you want to convince others of it?
RSSing it
Just downloaded NetNewsWire, which seems like a nice gadget for blog reading.
Oh, the tragedy! Fully half of the bloggers I want to read put only excerpts of their blogs into their RSS feeds. So I actually have to click on the link to the entry, if I want to read the whole entry.
I’d really rather not, in most cases. There are many people (including myself) who make the full entries, including images and/or comments (that last one I should really figure out), available through syndication. Is there a good reason not to do it?
Roland of Rolandseck
You may have heard (or read) my impression of the Roland legend’s German incarnation. Pfaffe (Priest) Konrad, sometime in the 12th century I think, translated the French Song of Roland into German, at the request of a wealthy patron. He did not pass on the opportunity to pepper the text with, literally, pages of moralistic sermon: “Oliver asked Roland again to blow his horn, and again Roland refused, and WOE TO HIM THAT IS TOO PROUD TO CALL FOR HELP FOR GOD WILL” etc.* So, okay, I thought; the Germans more or less knew the legend as the French had conceived it, with few changes except to make a religious martyr bordering on fanatic out of Roland. Seemed to make sense: in the days of yore, specifically during Charlemagne’s reign, both France and Germany were under his direct rule; and so the legend should be more or less the same, right?
Tutt’altro, as the Italians say. There’s a whole ‘nother thing.
A Google search reveals that the Roland-of-Rolandseck legend seems to exist in many versions. Here’s one whose wording I like. The “this” refers to Rolandsbogen, or Roland’s Bow, the stone window shown in the image. It stands on the Rhine, not very far from Bonn, in an area called Rolandseck (Roland’s Corner).
This is all that remains of the fortress that was built as a toll castle by the archbishops of Cologne in 1100. After the “Rolandsbogen” collapsed in 1840, its restoration was paid for by public donations.
According to the legend Sir Roland, a knight, built the castle for his bride, Hildegund, the daughter of the Knight of Drachenfels. Roland went off into battle against the Saracens and Hildegrund learned of his supposed death. She went into retreat at the convent on the Rhine Island of Nonnenwerth, and when Roland came home, he was heartbroken. Every day he looked out of his bow window at the convent and when Hildegund died soon after, they found him dead as well – at his window.
So, to sum up: the German legend retains the bit about Roland dying at Rencesvalles, but disregards it as rumor that is in fact untrue. Instead, Roland dies of lovesickness, staring out the window at the convent across the water, in which his beloved is wasting away in the name of love and Jesus.
*That isn’t an actual quote.
Now that’s research.
Whlie doing some online reading about modafinil’s possible interactions with alcohol (I’d like to know whether I can have a glass of wine every once in a while), I came across the following gem:
One healthy male volunteer developed ideas of reference, paranoid delusions, and auditory hallucinations in association with multiple daily 600 mg doses of Provigil and sleep deprivation. There was no evidence of psychosis 36 hours after drug discontinuation.
These people’s conclusion? “Caution should be exercised when Provigil is given to patients with a history of psychosis.”
One healthy male volunteer. One. Six hundred milligrams when the maximum recommended dose is four hundred, and sleep deprivation to boot. And they’re making pronouncements as to what they think should and shouldn’t be done with the drug? Aiie!
For whom the Roland tolls
I have got to go to Belgium.
In a bellfry, in Ghent, there is a bell called Roland. According to one work of fiction, the inscription on it reads: My name is Roland. When I tell, there is a fire; when I peal, there is a tempest in Flanders. Longfellow wrote a poem about it.
Here’s a fun bit. Sometime just after World War II, Luigi Dallapiccola wrote a short opera – set in sixteenth-century Spain – titled Il Prigioniero (The Prisoner). (Click on the link for a plot summary.) An interesting addition to the Roland corpus, in its odd but unmistakeable parallel to the French Song of Roland. To wit: our knight is the champion of Christendom, whose heart’s desire is to deliver every heathen from their wicked ways by word or steel. Well, okay, mostly steel. Obviously, he fails to do that for the Pagans that kill him. The same pagans whom Charlemagne had just previously besieged for seven years in the Spanish city of Saragossa, the last Pagan stronghold in Europe.
Centuries later, the prisoner finds himself in that same city, and Roland the Ghent bell fails to deliver him from a most evil expression of Christianity.
I did a double-take at that one, but it’s there. I’m wary of trying to see connections where there ain’t none, so this is probably where I’ll stop with The Prisoner. Still, very cool.
